My MacOS X

Want to remove the applescript logo in the menubar with the clock and airport ?Solution: Hold the Apple key and drag it out of the menu bar. This works for other Apple menu bar icons like battery, Airport, Input menu, Sound, Displays, etc. It’s also allows you to drag them off the menubar and rearrange with the cmd key, the other does not. For ones that don’t, there’s almost always an option to get rid of it by looking in the preferences of the app in question. tags: menubar applescript, Snow Leopard

Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.4, the fourth maintenance update for Snow Leopard, via Software Update. The update offers a number of fixes implemented since the release of Mac OS X 10.6.3 in late March. The 10.6.4 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It includes Safari 5 and general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes that:– resolve an issue that causes the keyboard or trackpad to become unresponsive – resolve an issue that may prevent some Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications ...(continue read)
tags: Snow Leopard, update

There Security Update 2010-001, which can be downloaded and installed via Software Update preferences, or from Apple DownloadsSize: 22.4MBCoreAudio CVE-ID: CVE-2010-0036Available for: Mac OS X v10.5.8, Mac OS X Server v10.5.8, Mac OS X v10.6.2, Mac OS X Server v10.6.2 Impact: Playing a maliciously crafted mp4 audio file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution Description: A buffer overflow exists in the handling of mp4 audio files. Playing a maliciously crafted mp4 audio file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. ...(continue read)
tags: security, Snow Leopard

Use the Tab key in user-created keyboard shortcuts in Snow Leopard. In OS X 10.5, pressing the Tab key while creating keyboard shortcuts (in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel) didn’t work; the system would just beep and not accept the Tab key.In Snow Leopard you can now use the Tab key in any combination with the Shift, Control, Command, and Option keys. For example, you could change the Exposé All Windows activation keystroke to Option-Tab, which might make sense if you’re used to using Command-Tab to switch applications and want to have a similarly-assigned ...(continue read)
tags: expose, short keys, shortcuts, Snow Leopard, system preferences

You can reveal the location of a recently-used item by holding down the Command key while looking at the Apple menu’s Recent Items menu. With the Command key held down, the wording of the menu items (for Applications and Documents) changes from some item to Show “some item” in Finder.source: osxdaily tags: 10.6, Snow Leopard

DNS request are usually cache, that’s good as it speeds up the lookups within the same host but sometimes we will want to clear the cache so it don’t hold the values that are no longer valid. In Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6) To clear DNS cache in Leopard, just type this in your Terminal and hit enter. dscacheutil -flushcacheTo Clear DNS cache in Mac OS X Tiger Use the following command: lookupd -flushcache What is DNS? The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system for computers, and anything else on the Internet. When you type a website’s name into your browser address ...(continue read)
tags: 10.5, cache, dns, Snow Leopard

If you are a web designer or do any work matching colors with photos, you are in luck. Mac OS X comes with a cool little program to help you get the digital value of any pixel on the screen. It’s called Digital Color Meter. Here is how to do it: Step 1: From the ‘Finder’ menu, choose ‘GO->Utilities’ or click Shift + Command + UStep 2: Next, open the app, ‘Digital Color Meter’Now, you can change the aperture size to smaller (left) or larger (right). Also, you can use the drop down menu to choose what format you want it represented in. For HTML coding, ...(continue read)
tags: 10.5, Development, HTML, programming, Snow Leopard, Web

One of the great features in Adobe Acrobat Pro is the ability to annotate (comment, markup, circle, highlight) PDF documents and images like JPEGs, PNGs, etc. Although, there are many other features (like creating forms) in Acrobat that are useful for PDFs, it’s not really fair to compare it to Preview. Nonetheless, for those who don’t have Acrobat Pro or don’t want to buy it, Preview has become quite powerful especially with the new Annotate toolbar added in Snow Leopard.Open up a PDF or IMAGE on your Mac with Preview. Click on the Annotate button in Preview, located next to the Select ...(continue read)
tags: preview, Snow Leopard

The seed is said to contain dozens of minor bug fixes and performance improvements in these areas: Address Book, AppleScript, AppleScriptObjC, ATS, ColorSync, Component Manager, Core Animation, Core Audio, Core Chinese Engine, Core Data, Core Graphics, Core Text, File Manager, Garbage Collection, Graphic drivers, Help Viewer, ImageKit, IOHIDFamily, Networking, NS Image, OpenCL, OpenGL, OSA, QT Kit, Speech Recognition, Sync Services, and Xtype. The seed notes reportedly include a caution that there is a known issue with optical drives: that they may not be recognized and the eject key may not eject ...(continue read)
tags: 10.6, Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard’s Terminal has a new very useful feature “SPLIT” / “COLLAPSE” as in many text editors. Check out the split/collapse window buttons here above the scroll bar:Click the top “split” button or press Command+D shortcut and now you’ve got your window split into two usable panes like so: To collapse the window press Command+Shift+D ALso, you can do multiple splits. Aside from general speed increase I think split pane in Terminal is my new favorite feature. See the Terminal Splits Windows Movie: You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube ...(continue read)
tags: short keys, Snow Leopard, Terminal, Text Editor

Quick Look has a hidden feature that is not enabled by default, and can only be enabled through Terminal. Essentially, when ‘X-Ray mode’ is turned on, Quick Looking a folder will show, in a way, the contents of the folder. Instead of just seeing the regular folder icon in Quick Look, the folder icon will be semi-transparent, with previews of the folder’s contents visible in the Quick Look window, as seen in the image at right. What’s more, the preview images will rotate automatically, moving through each item in the folder (click the image to see a movie of the animation). To ...(continue read)
tags: 10.5, 10.6, hidden feature, preview, Snow Leopard

If you want to quickly change your sound input device, simply Option-Click the Sound menu at the top of your screen to enable an alternate menu pulldown list of input devices. This trick is much faster than launching into the System Preferences and adjusting from microphone to line-in audio source. As far as I know this is new to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. tags: 10.6, audio, Snow Leopard, system preferences

Users who want to run the new 64-bit kernel on late-model Macs (pretty much anything released after early 2008) can do so by booting with the 6 and 4 keys held down. If you’re wondering whether your Mac has a 64-bit EFI firmware, you can type this command in Terminal: # ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi The response will identify the machine as either having 32-bit or 64-bit EFI. To boot 64-bit kernel every time you boot machine: 1. Print nvram settings # sudo nvram -p 2. Set boot-args to use 64 bit kernel # sudo nvram boot-args="arch=x86_64" Don’t forget to add ...(continue read)
tags: 10.6, kernel, Snow Leopard